


Efflorescence

by Jain



Category: Star Trek XI
Genre: Character of Color, Community: ladies1st, F/M, First Time, POV Third Person, Past Tense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-01
Updated: 2010-01-01
Packaged: 2017-10-27 03:13:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/291024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jain/pseuds/Jain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Uhura finds what she's looking for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Efflorescence

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Penknife](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Penknife/gifts).



The hardest thing about living on a starship had nothing to do with the danger, the uncertainty, the separation from family and friends.

It was not being able to go outside.

Uhura had never thought of herself as an outdoors person: most of her days at the Academy were spent going from dorm to classroom to lab to dorm, with the occasional outing to a cafe or bar. She hadn't realized how much she relied on the sweet hit of fresh air in her face as she left one building en route to another, or how much unconscious enjoyment she'd derived from the sun on her skin and the scent of growing things around her, overlaid with a salt tang from the bay.

By her third week on the Enterprise, she found herself roaming the halls restlessly during her free time, trying to find some relief from the monotony of steel, plastic, and transparent aluminum. She'd always tested very well in the Starfleet psych evaluations for claustrophobia, but now she felt closed in, trapped in the small space bounded by the ship's bulkheads.

Which of course she _was_ , she reminded herself every time she noticed her thoughts wending in this direction. And a good thing, too, considering the vacuum on the other side of the bulkheads.

She started playing with a few computer simulations of Earth, Tellar Prime, Cerberus...planets she'd spent some time on at various points in her life. She reacquainted herself with what she already knew to be true: planetary life existed in an incredibly limited space, just a delicate shell of breathable atmosphere surrounding a comparatively immense mantle and core. As a mental exercise, it was effective at forcing her to reconceptualize the terms of her existence on the Enterprise.

Unfortunately, it also threatened to replace her encroaching vague discomfort with living on a starship with a discomfort with living _anywhere_. What she needed wasn't to acknowledge that life existed only in tiny pockets within the vastness of space; it was to either visit someplace that looked enough like Earth to content her hindbrain, or to stop thinking about her surroundings altogether.

Throwing herself into her work helped accomplish the latter, to a certain extent. The Enterprise was completed, but the destruction of Vulcan had sent shockwaves through Starfleet, and some of the more rigorous field testing of inessential systems had been skipped. Communications hadn't broken down yet, but there had been a few unexpected bobbles; Uhura was getting both a mental and physical workout coordinating work on the ship's internal and external communications systems.

None of which led to her forgetting her mild yet pervasive sense of wrongness at not being able to step outside for a breath of fresh air, nor prompted her to cut back on her off-duty peregrinations.

A month and a half after the Enterprise became her new home, Uhura stepped through a nondescript door into a forest. She pulled up short, looking about her in startled wonder. She'd known that there was a botany lab on board, of course, and even known approximately where it was located. What she hadn't known was that it looked like _this_ : a little piece of wilderness tucked into the metal bowels of the Enterprise.

The effect seemed to be a deliberate design choice; a number of mid-sized trees and leafy bushes ringed the door, while most of the lab equipment was at least eight meters away, so that visitors to the lab would have to pass through the miniature wood to reach it.

Uhura walked down the corridor between the trees and bushes, breathing deeply. The lights throughout the ship were designed to recreate the wavelengths of natural light: Terran sunlight in the hallways and most of the public areas, due to the large human presence in Starfleet, and the light of other suns in carefully designated areas. Accordingly, the no-doubt carefully calibrated light of the botany lab wasn't especially noteworthy, though Uhura did appreciate the way it filtered through the trees. The scent of green plants and flowers and wet earth, however, was incredible after weeks of the Enterprise's sterile, filtered air.

She'd almost reached the center of the large room before she realized that she had company. Everyone in botany besides the head of the department had additional assignments, since the Enterprise's primary mission was to establish contact with sentient lifeforms, and not to collect exhaustive samples of the plants they encountered along their journey. Uhura knew the medical bay employed several botanists part-time in running lab tests, and there were others helping out in Engineering, though none in Communications. Still, the Enterprise was only recently out of spacedock, and it wouldn't be remarkable to find one of the botanists working on a pet project that he'd brought with him.

The man sitting at one of the high tables in the room wasn't a botanist, however, though he was bent over a plant with soft-looking spines that appeared at closer glance to be a--

"Is that a Vulcan orchid?" Uhura asked.

Sulu jerked his head up to look at her, then turned his attention back towards his plant. "Yeah. There's a movement to preserve as much of Vulcan's bio-organisms as possible, and I thought the orchid looked interesting."

"So you decided to lighten the botanists' loads?" Uhura said, pointedly glancing around the empty botany lab.

Sulu grinned. "This is just a hobby. I'm not stepping on anyone's toes. Actually, I know for a fact that Tanaka and Miller are both cultivating their own Vulcan gardens. They're a lot more dedicated than I am, though; they keep their plants in their _quarters_ , while I can't help having a strange attachment to keeping my weather controls set lower than forty-eight degrees."

Uhura laughed; the temperature was one of the few points of contention between her and Spock, and one of the main reasons--besides a general desire for discretion--that they hadn't put in an application for shared quarters. "It looks as though it's doing well," she said, admiring the shell-like patina on the spines.

"Thanks. I'm not sure if it's doing well enough to flower, but at least it's still alive," Sulu said. He reached out and rapped his knuckles against the branch of a nearby tree, then seemed to notice what he'd done and looked up at her half-ashamedly. "Uh, knock on wood," he said.

Uhura just smiled and nodded. She wasn't at all superstitious herself, but she found the trait mildly endearing in others, as long as they didn't let it carry them away. "Where _do_ you keep the orchid?" she asked. "I assume the botany lab has a separate room."

"Oh, yeah. Would you like to see it?"

"Please."

Sulu picked up the potted orchid as he slipped off his stool. "This needs to go back, anyway," he said, then led the way to a door set into the far wall. "Take a breath," he warned.

Uhura did as he urged, and was grateful for it when they stepped into a room as hot and dry as a sauna, its light ruddier than that of the main room. She sucked in a little more air before she released her held breath, trying to acclimatize her mouth and lungs to the heat. It didn't help much. "Are all of these plants Vulcan?" she asked.

Sulu glanced around the small room. "Almost. There are a few that came from Terran colonies. There's another room through that door--" He pointed to the left. "--that's about the same climate as this room, but that has a yellower light. Most of the desert plants live there." He set his orchid onto a nearby table.

Uhura wandered around the room slowly examining the plants. She recognized a few from her one visit to Vulcan before it had been destroyed, but most of them were unfamiliar to her.

"Do you garden?" Sulu asked, watching her progress.

Uhura shook her head. "No, never. I like plants, I just never had the time or the inclination."

"So what brought you to the botany lab, if you don't mind my asking?"

"Not at all. I was looking for someplace that didn't look like every other room in this ship. I hadn't actually expected to find what I was looking for, though."

She was bent over a small, bulbous cactus that looked something like a prickly cauliflower when Sulu replied, "It's a lot like being back home: you never know what you might find growing in your own backyard."

"I guess so," Uhura said. She'd entered Starfleet hoping to encounter new and interesting things on other worlds; it hadn't occurred to her that she might encounter them on her own ship, though she welcomed the realization.

* * *

With the botany lab on her list of places to visit regularly, the urge to wander the corridors of the Enterprise faded.

"It's more fun in here than in the rec room, isn't it?" Ensign Holmes asked her with bubbly enthusiasm the third or fourth time she saw Uhura in the botany lab.

"Sad, but true," Uhura agreed. She'd taken to doing leisure reading in the lab rather than in her quarters or in the noisy rec room; the botanists were apparently happy to work around her.

There were signs that the rec room might be picking up a bit, though, after the first couple of months when the crew was still getting to know each other, and before anyone had started any clubs or other regular activities. Kirk had begun organizing a weekly chess night, and he kept persuading Spock to play him despite--or perhaps _because_ \--Spock had thus far beaten him eleven games to three. For her part, Uhura had been talking up the rec room as a great place for people to play music; a surprising number of the crewmembers she'd talked to had brought a guitar or sitar or flute or other easily portable instrument with them.

One evening, after she'd finished singing a popular new United States of Africa song with Spock accompanying her on the lute, she looked up and caught Sulu's smiling face among the applauding crowd. She smiled back and crossed over to him. "I don't think I've seen you here before," she said in greeting.

"The couple of times I came, there wasn't much going on. I'll definitely be back if performances like this are a regular occurrence, though," he said, frankly appreciative.

Uhura's cheeks warmed a little with the compliment. "They aren't yet, but if you have any musical friends, you should try to persuade them to come share a song or two with us. We're always interested in hearing something new."

"I'll pass that along," Sulu said.

Spock's strumming resolved into a Vulcan song that she recognized, and Uhura said, "Sorry, I'm going to..." She nodded towards Spock.

"No problem," Sulu said, smiling even as she turned away. "Trust me, I'm looking forward to it."

* * *

The next day, Uhura found a leafy hanging plant with small, purple flowers arranged over her usual seat in the botany lab. There was a note on it addressed to her; when she opened it, she found that it read:

_Thanks for a wonderful performance. The plant's a spiderwort variant, if you don't recognize it. It's very easy to care for--just water once a week._

_\--Sulu_

Uhura raised the plant to her nose and inhaled. The flowers didn't have any appreciable scent, but the leaves smelled fresh and green, and it would look beautiful in her quarters.

Holmes walked in just then and spotted her and the plant. "Ooh, that's nice," she said. "Tradescantia fluminensis?"

"If that means 'spiderwort' in Latin, then yes," Uhura said.

Holmes grinned at her. "It does, yes. This is a lovely one. Most Tradescantia fluminensis have white flowers, but I'm partial to the purple myself."

"It is lovely," Uhura agreed. She hung the plant on one of the nearby hooks--there was rarely a shortage of places to put things in the botany lab--and brushed a couple of stray leaves off her seat, then sat down with her book, feeling her mouth curve in a private smile.

* * *

It was surprising, then, that when Uhura stepped onto the bridge ten hours later for her shift and nodded her thanks to Sulu, he responded with an embarrassed look and the barest inclination of his head.

Uhura took her seat at the communications station, confused and trying her best not to show it. Kirk had a tendency to note her moods like a shark scenting blood in the water. Even if he had the discretion not to attempt to pry out the reason behind her puzzled frown while they were on the bridge--a fifty-fifty proposition at best--he would no doubt approach her about it later. Neither of which were outcomes Uhura wanted to deal with.

So she did her work as calmly and efficiently as she knew how and pretended not to notice that Sulu was quieter and more assiduous about keeping his eyes on his controls and on the viewscreen than usual. Her relief arrived before Sulu's; Uhura lingered purposefully to discuss Lieutenant Cho's most recent translation of an intercepted Romulan message, until Sulu's relief arrived, at which point she headed for the turbolift.

She hesitated to see if he would speak first. When he didn't, she said, "Thank you for the spiderwort. It's beautiful."

"You're welcome." Sulu stared at the door of the turbolift for a long moment, and then said, "I hope you didn't consider the gift...presumptuous." A rueful look crossed his face. "Apparently, I need to be more up on my ship's gossip. I didn't actually know that you and Sp--er, Commander Spock, were dating until last night. Sorry."

Oh. Uhura shook her head. "We _are_ dating, but we're not monogamous. If that's not a deterrent for you, then there's nothing to worry about. And if that _is_ a deterrent for you, then the plant's a lovely gift from a friend, and there's still nothing to worry about."

Sulu blinked at her, startled. "I...uh...didn't think that Vulcans practiced polygamy."

"Spock's half-human," Uhura said--which wasn't really an answer to Sulu's question, but was at least a small part of the answer, and the only part that Uhura was comfortable sharing without Spock's explicit permission.

"Fair enough," Sulu said. There was a look on his face that suggested he knew that she was stonewalling him and that he was perfectly okay with that; Uhura liked him all the more for it. There was another brief silence, as Sulu processed recently revealed information, and then he nodded decisively. "Okay. I've never been involved in a polygamous relationship, but I'm willing to give it a try."

Uhura smiled at him. "There are things we'll need to discuss: what sorts of boundaries each of us is comfortable with, et cetera. But for now..." She hit the switch on the turbolift so that it came to a halt, then pulled Sulu into a kiss. She'd studied a map of the turbolift system for the Enterprise--it was no good having a mild kink if you didn't indulge it once in a while--and she figured they could tie up the turbolift for eight minutes before someone else was likely to need it (and at least twelve before anyone intercommed Engineering to fix the "broken" turbolift, but this wasn't the right time to press their luck). Not enough time to do very much, but more than enough to make a good beginning.


End file.
